When a user is waiting for a rideshare or public transportation vehicle to arrive at their location, the user may wish to view an animation showing the real time or near real time location of the rideshare vehicle. Similarly, a fleet manager managing a fleet of rideshare vehicles, delivery vehicles, emergency response vehicles, public transportation vehicles, and/or the like may wish to view an animation showing the real time or near real time location of the fleet vehicles. Generally, users prefer the animation of a vehicle's motion to be smooth. For example, users generally prefer that the vehicle marker move smoothly across the graphical user interface, rather than appearing to move across the graphical user interface in a series of jumps and pauses. However, a smooth animation generally requires a large set of high-frequency location data in order to mimic a smooth stream of timestamped vehicle positions. For example, a network request may be made every 100 milliseconds to a map matching system to obtain sufficient map-matched vehicle location data to provide a smooth, 10 frames per second (fps) animation. The number of network requests further increases if more than one vehicle is to be tracked by the animation. Thus, when using traditional methods, the number of network requests used to display a smooth animation is extremely high, which is costly in both bandwidth and mobile device battery life terms.